Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

It is this assumption of authenticity - and it is not confined only to bootstrap believers - which I personally find most interesting, predicated as it upon a cultural hegemony and a political superstructure which exists precisely for the so-called 53%.

Typing very broadly, they rightly perceive the end of their order, because demographics are in fact a kind of political fate.

Ruling factions need governed populations. They need people who serve as extraction points, who are roughly equivalent to raw materials in an unprocessed state. Historically, the form varies: slaves, the corvee, peasants, proletarians, the permanently indebted; their chief function is the production of labor. In our own age, that is labor sold, and excess labor consumed, or distracted. The factions of the ruling class contend with each other for control of these laboring populations, seeking them out wherever conditions provide for the cheapest purchase and the most flexible interface. The factions compete for control of divisions in memory: cultural, tribal, religious, ethnic and national boundaries which are drawn and redrawn in order to lay claim to labor. These laboring populations have a relationship to the states which claim possession of them, one which takes shape according to the needs of state and the strengths of competitors: they are bound by a rough and one-way rule of custom, tradition, religion, crude history and the threat of force - whatever it takes to produce a minimum fealty to those who own and rule.

The ruling class, and its factions, need to possess them. Which means, management.

States have an interest in producing client populations who buffer and manage the pool of labor and its extraction of resources. Who absorb discontent. Who are vested in their own separation from it. States encourage their existence with investment in the infrastructure and institutions which produce them, and to which these technicians and professionals will later on profess considerable devotion.

These technicians don't only serve as the ruling class support staff. They are equally its clients. They are the protected.

The point of running a protection racket is to have someone to protect. And to have enemies against which they must be protected. The ruling class needs clients who also double as consumers of excess, as buffers against disorder and decay, and as absorbers of discontent. Most actual and historical states preserve this client population more or less with predictability. The state and its ruling factions don't need the buffer, exactly, but it makes the business of being wealthy and powerful a whole lot easier. It is from this client pool that the ruling class and its various factions draw their technicians, their management, their support staff, their caregivers, professionals, systems operators - and their officers. Client populations derive some benefit from the relationship. They are not merely human resources. And these client groups vest themselves in response. They buy in. They belong. They are not possessed. They serve, and this requires a less immediate, less visceral and less visible set of bindings: a tradition and mythos of self-reliance, self-creation and voluntary existence. This might explain the long-standing project to develop, shield and promote the nuclear family. Nuclear families are protected by the state. This kind of family produces isolates and managerial personalities; and they are governed by an urge to succeed, to merit, to deserve, to keep faith with the expectations of those who rule. It demands the repeatable formation of a specific self, a narrow and truncated type conceived and formed to treat with itself first as an independent ego ensconced in purpose and convinced of its own self-causation, and secondly as a truth unto itself.It is a type which places a high value on faith and loyalty: in marriage, in law, in custom, in deed, in debt. Its gods are debt-managers. Its heroes pay their dues, pay off the loan, pay the ultimate sacrifice. Its villains are oathbreakers, layabouts, cheaters, scoundrels, vagrants and the corrupt.

The recurring theme of corruption crosses political, moral and religious divisions - for the technicians and professionals. It animates their righteousness. It is perhaps the defining characteristic of this type - a deep rooted, material, mnemonic fascination with and recoiling from corruption. It is their awe; it is what they desire and shun, in identical alternating moments. Their politics and their morality reflect this fact. Corruption is, for them, the antithesis of the good faith to which they been bred. It is sickness, a contagion. It is failure. It is, in short, the failure to deserve.

It is no surprise that they see in the Other a source of corruption. For liberals, for the good fight progressives, that corruption wears the face of wanton power. It is power which negates the liberal noblesse oblige. Raw power. Power which does not improve. The Other is a man on a mythical horse who should have known better, a potential knight, but one who corrupted himself instead in the base pleasures of brigandage and rapine. For conservatives, that Other bears the sins of Eve, and the traditional mark of Cain - she is an outcast before she is ever born. The Other's depravity is its natural condition. God, nature, fate, history, breding, evolution* are vehicles for the confirmation of this depravity. The poor are moral failures. Suffering is self-created, it is a falling away from the hegemony of the norm, a norm which peers out from under its limitations and withdraws back inward if it does not see itself looking back in upon it.

This is the historical moment in which we find ourselves: that norm no longer functions. The built in limitations, the constraints, the self-disciplining customs are all less useful. The faces have changed. Lifestyles have taken hold of a media saturated culture, and permissible conduct has expanded in response. The ruling class has adapted to demographic fate. It has co-opted some of its former excluded identities. It has become, in a word, tolerant - to the degree that these tolerances preserve its power, and aid in the contest between its factions.

For liberals, this is no real problem. Their Other is the other half of the managerial sub-class. They are in conflict at their own level. It is a horizontal dispute. It is a political fight, between class equals. They are fighting corruption in their own ranks.

For conservatives and nativists, this ruling class tolerance is far more troublesome. It is a corruption from above and below. Their relation to new lifestyles, populations and pressures is reaction. They imagine themselves as conservators; against corruption, they see themselves as both the protectors of order and as clients of its protection, struggling with an Other that not only threatens to end the cultural hegemony to which they belong, but which is in a devil's compact with corrupt leaders who are shockingly willing to reward laziness, sloth, racial inadequacy, sexual deviancy, gender disloyalty, role and rule breaking, and a host of other sins, all in trade for unjust and unearned power.

It is a threat to their authenticity, to their rightful, faithful, loyal claim to the nation and its culture. But it does not bring them, as a rule, to a breaking point, to severance. They retreat backwards. They take refuge in their myths. They double down on loyalty to the very people who not only rule them but who will gladly slot them down into poverty for a cheaper client and a campaign ad with brown faces in it.

2 comments:

"But it does not bring them, as a rule, to a breaking point, to severance. They retreat backwards. They take refuge in their myths. They double down on loyalty to the very people who not only rule them but who will gladly slot them down into poverty for a cheaper client and a campaign ad with brown faces in it."

In agreement, gonna try to Alice Millerize this one.

from the OT: God and Job --> unconditional submission;

awareness that being owned, "made someone's bitch" in a certain parlance, is humiliation, annihilation of self (lack of awareness of the problem of humiliation is not the problem);

the reality --> face in mud, master's boot on back of neck, the image too painful to be allowed into consciousness;

a reversal?: it's not me in the mud, it's the ungrateful ones, and I'm standing up, alongside master; it's categorically impossible for God/master/mommy/daddy to betray me--that would be death; I feel the humiliation in my bones, but how to make sense of it when the obvious explanation is impossible? STOP WHINING!, shouted in master's voice, escalating as the boot digs in.

She...Her...a muse, her own self, that sweetness on the morning dew side of the leaf...

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

Until today I had the same attitude towards Robert Greenwald as I do Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and most other representatives of the w...

"Now assholes and bureaucrats, take my advice...You’d better walk clear and you’d better talk nice...‘Cause we’re hot on your trail and we’re not on your side...Better forward your mail, shoot your wounded and ride...‘Cause when we’ve got all you desk jockeys safe behind bars...Claimed some of the neon, and some of the cars...Me and Billy and Oscar and the girls and guitars...Will be down in the gutter, looking up at the stars..." ~ James Luther Dickinson, The Ballad of Billy and Oscar